Gov 2.0: Beyond the Platform

Originator of the phrase Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly seeks to breathe new life and purpose into the phrase Gov 2.0.

His mantra …Gov 2.0: It’s All About The Platform.

As Tim emphasizes, innovative new platforms are game-changers – for companies, economies, all of us. Think how interstate highways, personal computers, the Internet, GPS, even the iPhone each transformed society. Each was a new platform for commerce and people to use.

Today, new technologies are helping redefine what governments as a platform can accomplish. Gov 2.0 means more than simply government use of social media. Absolutely right.


However, let us not lose sight of the whole purpose of Gov 2.0. It is not all about the platform. The platform has a purpose: real-time public service.

Gov 2.0 must keep its eyes on that prize. O’Reilly is closest when he imagines Gov 2.0 as an “organizing engine for civic action.”

What makes Gov 2.0 enormously transformative is that government, powered by new technologies, is more than a platform; it is a catalyst for innovations in real-time, public service. Government offers not only a scalable operating system for services, but also adds raw data, standards, APIs, apps, even investment dollars in some cases.

Gov 2.0 is an open ecosystem in which anyone — a start-up, an agency, an entrepreneurial individual — can invent, enhance or crowdsource a service aimed at the public, or some segment of it. Government becomes one delivery channel among many.

Gov 2.0, in many ways, echoes President Kennedy’s famous words:

Open Data Meets Hyperlocal in San Francisco

Once again San Francisco renews its claim to be the most open city in America, and the most open government.

Mayor Gavin Newsom announced the launch of DataSF.org, a new website offering citizens access to raw, machine-readable government data on a wide range of issues from crime and housing to health inspections and street repairs.

The basic idea behind this initiative? Open data drives innovation. Free access to information gathered by government enables developers and citizen entrepreneurs to create new applications and online services. Open data is exactly what will power the growth of hyperlocal websites, which cater to the interests and needs of local communities.

The emergence of hyperlocal news and online services is already a trend receiving much attention, and investment. MSNBC’s acquisition of EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news aggregator, is one recent example, but not the only one. AOL and even the New York Times have entered the hyper-local space.

Finding the right business model for hyperlocal sites will be a challenge. For every MSNBC and AOL buying in, there is a Washington Post exiting. Success requires real community participation, not always easy to sustain when the website belongs to a big corporate entity, as well as a local advertising base will to spend.

Still, more governments offering open data is a good thing, promoting transparency and public accountability, regardless of whether hyperlocal websites succeed or not.

Aging Silos and Open Data

A new job often means big plans. So it is for the new Federal CTO, Aneesh Chopra. He's saying all the right things, but can he make all the right moves?

In his visit to Silicon Valley yesterday, Chopra called for the elimination of technology silos that litter the government landscape.

Good idea.

Focusing on IT, however, is less impactful than focusing on information. Tearing down data silos is more important -- for the public, the economy and improved government services.

The new federal IT dashboard showing tech spending by federal agencies is a nice start. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) moved in a similar direction when it required all federal agencies to use the same open, standardized formats for financial reporting so spending under the Recovery Act can be displayed on Recovery.gov. Shining a light on how government spends our money is helpful.

But more must be done. Windows of transparency are nice. Access to actual data is better.

Government needs to open source its information, research and investment. Perhaps our new federal CTO and CIO should commit to opening up access to a different set of government data every week. The public can help. Create an online forum where people can suggest (and vote for) what information they want made publicly available.

Call it democratizing data. Or open sourcing data. Either way, there is a powerful magnifier effect to increasing public access to government data that will drive innovation and real economic opportunity, not to mention government transparency.

That is creative silo destruction we can believe in.

Mr. Obama, tear down these silos!


Categories: government, OpenStandards, innovation

GSA "FEMAs" California

Life on the Internet can be fragile, as California learned yesterday. While taking counter-measures against a hacker re-directing traffic from a state county's website to a porn website, the U.S. General Services Administration deleted California - virtually.

For seven hours, the entire ".ca" domain -- home to every government agency in California -- was gone. A flick of a a switch and ... No web access. No email. No California.

It started with the discovery that the website for Transportation Authority of Marin Country was hacked, and all traffic we sent to pornographic websites. The fear that its DNS server had been compromised, and could thus compromise the entire ".ca" domain apparently led the GSA to make California disappear entirely -- or more technically de-list ".ca" making it in accessible from servers worldwide.

As more public services become web-delivered, the need for reliable 24/7 access is obvious. Maybe a little more attention needs to be paid to disaster recovery by governments as they pursue e-government.

Who needs an earthquake when you have GSA? Maybe we should get FEMA to take over the ".gov" domain management.

India Rejects OOXML, for Now

Another big shoe has dropped on OOXML.

India will vote "No" at the upcoming ISO vote on whether or not OOXML should be a standard. For the moment, India is saying "not."


After six hours of debate, 19 of the 21 members of India's technical committee agreed to vote "No" with comments, meaning that should Microsoft later address technical concerns about OOXML, India might shift its position. That will be no easy task. There are some 200 technical issues that have been raised by various parties to the OOXML specification, which itself spans a few thousand pages.

Last week a similarly big blow struck OOXML when Brazil decided to vote "No". As one member of its technical committee indicated, Brazil is likely to use ODF as the basis for its national document standard.

Most countries have not yet indicated their position. However, with the US abstaining and China and Japan voting "No," it is difficult to see how OOXML will in reality become a global standard, regardless of the ISO vote results.

ODF and OOXML will likely coexist for a time, and some (like Gartner) argue that OOXML will be the de facto standard given Microsoft's market dominance. Yet, technology dominance is a hard to maintain forever, and the winds are shifting as governments look to ODF, not OOXML, as the foundation for their own national standards.

After all, silicon is not stone. There is always the hope that Microsoft will continue to evolve and find a way to provide backward compatibility with all its proprietary formats while still ensuring that an unencumbered document standard like ODF is the way forward.

Categories: OpenStandards, OOXML, India, Brazil

Open Source Samurai

Japan is planning to put Microsoft to the sword. The government has announced that open source software will be top priority in public procurement, and vendors are lining up to provide it.

Open source may prove to be Japan's Field of Dreams, demonstrating to the world that when creating a market for open source, if government buys it, they will come.

The Ministry of Communications has issued new procurement guidelines that makes open source (specifically, Linux) a priority beginning on July 1.

Japan's open source move follows a recent policy declaring that technologies based upon open standards, including the OpenDocument Format (ODF), will have priority.

It is notable that the initial list of vendors jumping at the open source opportunities on offer by the Japanese government do not include any "pure" open source companies.

The Japanese government will need to be mindful that procurements involving open source are not like other IT procurements. They require real work by an agency to identify potential open source solutions and the support (internally, or by vendors, consultants or communities) BEFORE a tender is put into the market.


Categories: opensource, Japan

Problems? Blame the Blogs

That is what the Malaysian government is doing apparently. Malaysia's Information Minister has warned newspapers (and by extension citizens) against using blogs as sources of information. According to the Star newspaper, Minister Zainuddin Maidin described blogs as "anarchist websites" and said most websites are run by frustrated journalists and political pundits.

Governments, companies and politicians worldwide are having difficulty adjusting to our wired world. The Internet disintermediates government and others who have traditionally filtered or rationed information. News oligopolies have ended.

Today, individuals can easily and instantaneously project their ideas, opinions and reporting out to the world. It can be a painful experience, as the Malaysian government discovered when allegations of corruption appeared in blogs and were later picked up by mainstream media.

Instant, unfiltered access to information is good. Yet, people still have a responsibility to assess (and question) the credibility of sources -- whether they are blogs or government-controlled media.

It's hard to lose control, and easy to scapegoat bloggers, as I noted here in connection with a company targeting a widely read blog.

As with most things, however, the fault lies not in our blogs but in ourselves.


Categories: Malaysia, blogging

Open Source Politics in the UK

Open source was thrust into the rough-and-tumble of British politics this week when the Tory Party's shadow chancellor criticized Tony Blair's Labor Party for its failure to expand use of open source software in government.

George Osborne seems to get it, and he spoke with clarity and passion. In his remarks (full speech is here), he complained of the uneven playing field for open source in government procurement.

But his challenge went beyond procurement rules. Osbourne called for a change in the culture of government in the digital age, and presented a technology strategy for the Conservative Party based upon three pillars: equality of information, social networking and open source. And not just open source as software but open source as a powerful model for mass collaboration.

Open source politics does not mean open source dictatorship. A Conservative Party spokesperson underscored this after the speech:

"Procurement should be based on what best meets their needs. Functionality, performance, security, value and the cost of ownership of software should be the priority, not categorical preferences for open source software, commercial software, free software or any other software development model."

If only more politicians spoke like this.

Categories: opensource, UK, government

Leveraging Open Source (or Open Anything)

Declaring a commitment to open source and other open technologies is the easy part. Finding ways to actually leverage open ICT is hard, as governments are discovering.

This lesson is learned and re-learned every day, as two articles I saw today illustrated. First, a new survey in India indicated that one major challenge to growth of open source was customers convinced of its value remain unsure how to leverage open source in their organizations. This problem is directly linked to low skill levels and experience in open ICT, few incentives to explore open source options, how staff performance is measured, and a failure of leadership by senior managers.

The second story came from the Land of Kiwis where the New Zealand Open Source Society complained about the non-tender of a government software procurement. The NZ story highlights 2 major obstacle to successfully leveraging open source: (1) There is often no vendor representing an open source option, while proprietary vendors deploy armies of sales and marketing personnel; and (2) Too often tender documents (RFPs and RFIs) specify a specific vendor or product, thus totally eliminating the possiblity of any open source options.

In New Zealand, a government agency issued a tender (designed by an outside consultant) for a service provider to implement a Microsoft-based online registration system. Not an online registration system. A Microsoft-based system. Nothing against Microsoft, but governments should focus on the services they want to deliver, not forever locking themselves into one company or technology.

Wait-and-see approaches to procurement will not maximize choices, competition or value for money. Nor will they produce in open source options.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard. Service-oriented, technology-neutral procurement goes against everything that procurement officers and CIOs know or have learned. Only clear direction (and rewards) from an organization's leadership can change this.

Categories: opensource, procurement, government

Governments: Follow Consumers in ICT

Governments can learn a thing or two from consumers when it comes technology. And they should, especially when it comes to using and buying technology. After all, consumers -- the public -- are government's primary customers.

What ICT lessons should governments learn from consumers?

1. Services trump hardware. In the end, people care less about the hardware and more about the content and services that hardware delivers. Hardware becomes obsolete. Services and users endure. This is the main reason for governments and enterprises to focus on becoming service- and user-oriented, and leaving behind their (procurement) attention on hardware.

2. The physical is moving to digital. People like -- they want! -- new ways of getting information and services. They don't want to stand in lines. They don't want to wait on hold on the telephone. Enter "disruptive distribution channels." Internet, instant messages, email, Blackberries, podcasts, blogs, P2P, Bluetooth. They all represent new ways to access information and services -- from governments, companies AND, importantly, from each other.

3. New technologies become mainstream faster today. Consumers are adopting new technologies faster than ever now. And old technologies become obsolete faster than ever. Governments must be aware of this, or risk falling far behind their customers in the ICT they use and the delivery channels they want. Governments cannot afford to only think about upgrades; they need to think about the next generation of ICT (and distribution) to deliver public services and information.

To avoid becoming obsolete, governments need to take their technology cues from consumers.

Categories: consumers, ICT, government

Cities Will Be Innovation Leaders in 2007

Open source, open standards and open technologies will continue to make big news and big gains among governments and enterprises in 2007. However, I expect the real action -- the real leadership -- in open ICT will be by municipal governments. Cities are today's leading open innovators.

As 2006 ended, cities were driving technology innovation (and open ICT) in the public sector. Notable examples include:

* Netherlands: Amsterdam (and 8 other cities) issued a "Manifesto for Open Source in Government," committing themselves to bringing open ICT to city government. Amsterdam will commence an open source demonstration project in early 2007.

* France: the greater Paris region will become a center of excellence for open source software development. The effort will be a major public-private partnership aiming to provide a new foundation for innovation and growth.

* South Korea: A major city, Gwangju Metropolitan City, has been designated an Open Source City in order to promote regional software development and drive economic competitiveness. The city completed an Information Strategy Plan, identifying areas ripe for open source in their infrastructure. Execution begin in the education sector.

* Germany: A healthy competition exists among cities vying to be Germany's open source trendsetter. Current contenders include Munich, Nuremburg, Mannheim, and even tiny Schwäbisch Hall (population 36,000), the first to entirely replace Windows.

* Numerous cities big and small -- including Vienna, Bergen, Bristol, Birmingham, Barcelona, and even Kenosha, Wisconsin -- are adopting open technologies. The race is on, and there are new entrants every day.

The trend is clear: For leadership in open source and open ICT, look to your cities.


Categories: OpenSource, innovation, government

Technology Neutral ≠ Open Source Inaction

Memo to governments: technology-neutral policies on procurement do not mean that governments should do nothing about open source. While governments like Malaysia are neutralizing formal preferences (or mandates) for open source, they should not become passive about procurement or competition within the ICT market.

Technology neutrality is not a natural state, for governments or anyone else. People have preferences, even if policies on paper do not. Removing a sentence from an Open Source Master Plan, as Malaysia has done, does not magically level the playing field in ICT procurement. Neither does an open source preference for that matter. Procurement trumps policy every time.

To establish a truly neutral and competitive procurement environment, governments need to focus on 2 things: (1) setting clear objectives; and (2) burning your old, standard RFPs.

For step 1, Malaysia has it right. Its OSS Framwork sets the right targets: increase software choices and interoperability, reduce total costs of ownership and vendor lock-in, and ensure security.

Step 2 -- changing how procurement is actually done -- is much harder. It requires both changing rules and how people act. Tweaking your procurement policies will not work because you cannot "tweak" people's behavior. More dramatic action is needed.

Three actions can help drive changes in procurement practices and behavior. First, issue new standard RFP provisions that show agencies what neutral language looks like. Second, establish new criteria for bid evaluation that takes proper account of how open source works in the market. Lastly, find a way to make agency interactions with vendors more transparent. Too often, procurement decisions are made behind closed doors before an RFP is even issued. That is not a formula for value for money.

Categories: open, source, procurement, Malaysia, government

You Want Open ICT? Burn The Boats (or RFPs)

When it comes to technology policies, governments should heed the words of Hernan Cortez … “Burn the boats.” Or, more specifically, burn the RFPs.

Procurement is the real measure of a government’s approach to technology. How “open” a government is toward ICT is not measured by whether or not it buys open source software, but how it procures technology. It's not what you buy, but how you buy it that counts most.

As governments are discovering – most recently in Australia and UK-- tweaking existing procurement policies to encourage more bidding by open source companies will not create more choices, even when specific open source companies are pre-qualified.

Procurement band aids will not lead to increased competitive bidding, ICT choices and access to innovation. Your old procurement rules, evaluation criteria and standard RFPs will not work. They will not level the playing field. They will not break vendor lock-in.

Why? Because conventional government RFPs are structured for big, proprietary vendors. They evaluate bidding companies based on criteria inappropriate for open technologies.

For example, public agencies still focus more on purchasing products, while open source solutions are more about services and support. RFPs often under-value interoperability, and instead focus on system specs and large product suites. Criteria such as minimum annual revenues and established user base disadvantage small companies and tend to proliferate vendor lock-in.

And let’s be honest, too many RFPs are rigged, written in order to buy a specific solution from a specific company with whom the procurement officers have long-standing relationships. Their objective is not best value-for-money, competitive bidding or technology neutrality, but buying a specific system already pre-determined.

Thailand v. Philippines: Open Source Opposites?

When it comes to open source software, Thailand and the Philippines are heading in opposite directions. A change in government in Thailand has led to open hostility and backpedaling by the new Minister of ICT toward open source. At the same time, in the Philippines, Congress will begin hearings on mandating government use of open source.

In his first press conference as Thailand’s new ICT Minister, Sitthichai Pokaiudom referred to open source as buggy and useless. He added, "With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain. If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated."

Minister Sitthichai’s views on open source are 10 years out of date, and ignore or misconstrue a few basic realities:

o Open source and intellectual property are not incompatible. Open source simply involves a different approach to the use of IP, not its abandonment. It does not consign everything to the public domain; it is simply governed by a different kind of license. It offers a different balance between creators and users.

o Open source is not the enemy of profit. There are open source companies making money, lots of it. The fact is that open source requires new business models, ones that emphasize services over products. Entrepreneurs, enterprises and investors will struggle to learn what business models work. Some will learn the hard way. Open source’s creative destruction brings both innovations and business failures. In this way, open source is no different than other industries. Revolutions are usually messy, disruptive and divisive.

o All software is buggy, regardless of the software development model used. One need only consider the millions (or billions) of dollars and hours spent on Microsoft Windows over the past 20 years. It’s the nature of the beast. And here is another hard truth: software projects fail. The volume of proprietary software built that has failed surely exceeds the number of open source projects that have stagnated. That is hardly the basis for condemning either model.

o Open source offers more than just financial gain. As emphasized by the author of the FOSS legislation in the Philippines, open source gives small and medium-size enterprises greater access to ICT, enabling them to compete in new ways and new sectors. It allows for local customization that is often impossible with off-the-shelf, proprietary software. It gives organizations greater control over their ICT decision-making.

And yes Minister, open source sometimes saves money.

Lessons from the Open Source Frontier

For governments and companies seeking to use open source software to drive a national ICT strategy or company profits, China offers a few open source lessons.


Lesson #1: If you’re in the open source business, you’re in the business of communities.

Chinese companies learned this the hard way. Initially, only foreign software companies invested in building communities in China around their products. Now, both the government and Chinese companies are in the community building business.

Is open source community building really a big deal? The Chinese government thinks so. It regards open source communities as key to its software industry and is committing more public resources toward them in its eleventh Five-Year-Plan (2006-2010).

What is the upside for companies? Mainly they seek (a) to identify and develop the open source talent needed to speed product development; and (b) to promote their products in the local market.

Lesson #2: The long-term success in open source rests on talent, not mandates.

In real estate, the rule is “location, location, location.” The open source mantra is “talent, talent, talent.” Talent is the key to the long-term viability of open source communities (and businesses). But talent – that is, people – takes time to develop.

The Chinese government is not replacing market incentives. However, in some places the market is not enough. Chinese programmers find that earning their daily bread (or rice) leaves them little time to contribute to open source communities. And so, the communities languish with scant resources and few core participants.

Education, incentives to entrepreneurs, the competitive landscape for open source solutions all contribute to the long-term development of human resources for open source.

China is adding another option for governments to encourage the maturation of the open source industry. Not by procurement mandates, but by providing resources needed for communities to grow. Money is no guarantee, but support by a public-private partnership gives new open source communities a leg up. Not every country faces the same problems. However, in countries with a dearth of open source talent, governments can play a positive role in supporting the development of open source talent, both in their schools and online communities.

Government is Own Worst Enemy for Open ICT

Side note: Please take the poll over here!!! -------------->

At last week's GOSCON conference, Andy Stein, CIO for the City of Newport News, Virginia, hightlighted the fact that governments are often their own worst enemies when it comes to openizing their ICT ecosysems.

The traditional procurement system does not work when it comes to open source. Even worse, it prevents innovative public - private technology partnerships and even agency-to-agency collaboration. Policies on open standards, open source and open ICT that are not directly incorporated into procurement rules and practices are destined to fail.

These are points that I make in every conference at which I speak about open technologies. It is also emphasized in the Open ePolicy Group's Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems. Governments that want to "openize" their ICT ecosystems and drive innovation need to re-write their procurement rules.

This requires not only ending the practice of naming specific products, vendors and technologies in RFPs. The whole RFP process needs to be altered, or scrapped entirely. Criteria for selection of bids needs to change. Due diligance and contract management need to account for the fact that open source licenses, communities and companies work differently than proprietary vendors.

News Item of Note: Loss of Data by U.S. Agencies is Widespread.